Hardware vs. Software render times
 

First of all whats the difference between Hardware and software render? Ive heard that Hardware uses your gfx card right? so does software just use your cpu?

also isint software supposed to be faster? because im rendering a scene and in software it took about 20 seconds per scene but in hardware it was only 7 seconds.

my pc specs are Amd 64bit 3200+ processor and a nvidia geforce 7900. and 2.5gigs of ram

Hello kerregan,

according to the Maya f1 help files....

Hardware rendering is...

An interactive rendering method that uses the capabilities of a computer’s graphics card to create lighting and texturing effects.

and

Software rendering is....

A rendering method that uses software to create lighting and texturing effects. Software rendering may take longer than hardware rendering, but is required for certain kinds of details and effects.

Essentially you will only get a very basic render with the hardware render, not dis-similar the view you have in the work area under High Quality Rendering mode. Software render uses either the built in Maya render or 3rd party renderers (Mentalray, Maxwell etc.) which means that you will get raytracing, refractions, FG, IBL all of the fancy stuff that makes an image look good.

Hope that clears things up a bit for you,

Mat.

yer what mat said,

a question mat from me since your familiar with lighting etc. just say you have a scene/project which the render you are using is mental ray and you have tweeked all your settings and options up, what happends if you have something which needs to be rendered in hardware like a lighting bolt etc,

would you have to render out in hardware but then all your MR options go to no use and your render becomes ugly? how would you do both of them?

marlon

Theres only really particles that you need to render out in HW

what you would do is composite it together using various filters etc, the hardware render would take the lighting into account, but not from say a HDR or GI from Mental Ray, but you would get away with it in comping it together.

Oh forgot to add you would have to render it in layers to get them sepperate, and with an alpha channel

ohh i see ... thanks